The beautiful, intelligent sisters who ‘walked alongside revered mid-century thinkers’
THE QUALITY OF LOVE Twin sisters at the heart of the century
ARIANE BANKES 288pp. Duckworth. £18.99.
ASA SMALL CHILD in the 1950s Ariane Bankes was pushed on her swing by A. J. (“Freddie”) Ayer, champion of logical positivism, beaten at Chinese chequers by “Uncle Arthur” Koestler and entertained by Laurie Lee playing the fiddle and spinning plates. Sonia Orwell might rock up with champagne; Inez Holden – model for Augustus John, friend of H. G. Wells and champion of the 1930s working poor – might turn up at the weekend. Ariane’s first toy was a bear sent by Albert Camus. All very ordinary to a child, living a quiet country life unaware of the turbulent European history echoing around her. Now, thoughtful and careful, the adult Ariane looks back to reconstruct an engaging untold story.
Bankes’s mother Celia Paget and Celia’s identical twin Mamaine became, by chance and character, embedded intellectually and socially in the heart of twentieth-century change. Neither wrote an autobiography, and Mamaine died at thirty-seven, but when Celia died in 2002, Bankes found in a tin trunk an extraordinary collection of letters, diaries, negatives and other papers dating to the period from the 1930s to the war, the birth of Israel and the Cold War. Both women were beautiful, intelligent, freethinking and above all what Celia called “friendable”, rarely falling out of touch or sympathy with each new figure who swam across their lives or into their beds.
The record of their lives is frankly extraordinary: a quality shared by Bankes’s book, long in gestation and all the better for it. Bankes deciphered the items from the trunk and took a step back so as to set in context moments of literary, political and philosophical history. The result is riveting; a duller writer would have made it three times the length and far less fun. The twins’ letters in particular offer a fresh take on how it was to walk alongside revered midcentury thinkers.
Mamaine met Koestler in 1944 at a party hosted by Cyril Connolly. “During the summer”, writes Bankes, “their relationship developed into one of passionate encounters and bitter rows”.
Her defiance was a good foil to Koestler’s overbearing manner and kept her inoculated against his wilder mood swings; and when he wasn’t tortured by writer’s block or seething with resentment against his political opponents, she found him an irresistible companion.
The pair lived together in Paris: Mamaine was Koestler’s amanuensis and sparring partner, when he wasn’t off sleeping with Simone de Beauvoir or she decamping to Avignon for an intense liaison with Camus. This is how Mamaine drily observed the charm of Jean-Paul Sartre: “While
